Library Archive Management System

Tender description

The University Library Special Collections has approximately 7 million manuscript items, making it the seventh largest holdings of archives and manuscripts in a UK HE institution. Southampton is one of the main repositories for Jewish archives in Western Europe. The papers of the first Duke of Wellington and the Broadlands Archive constitute two of the University Library's foremost collections of manuscripts and are a major element in our written heritage. The Wellington Papers provide an unparalleled resource into events of the Napoleonic wars. Papers of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his wife, Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, contain the foundation archive for the states of India and Pakistan. The material for Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, are crucial for understanding Britain's place in the world in the mid-nineteenth century. Southampton is now set to become a centre of archival collections on maritime archaeology. Interest across the range of archive collections continues to grow, due both to their scope and national and international importance. The archive collections do not currently have a workflow management system: document acquisition, description, catalogue display and ultimately image and digital object visualisation is achieved as a series of disjointed processes. There is no single point of entry for accessing information, making finding information about the collections difficult . The existing underpinning irastructure is more than 10 years old and is at end of life. Moving to an integrated Archives Collections Management System with robust supplier support will provide a sustainable solution. Significantly enhanced functionality will deliver a transformative step change in the user experience. There is currently no automated Conservation Document Management System, so most documentation relating to conservation and exhibition work is paper based. The current Digital Image Viewer holds some digitised material from the Special Collections, but is not integrated to or interoperable with the archives catalogues. The University of Southampton (UoS) is seeking bids for: Lot 1: Archives Collections and Conservation Document Management System Lot 2: Digital Image Viewer